[Previous entry: "Bank holidays, and shifting to LJ"] [Next entry: "Publication, and LiveJournal" ]
Kipple
1 May 2006
Eventually, this cat is going to teach me discipline and order. They will be survival traits.
Thing is, he is an uppity cat; he observes anything higher than himself, and he needs to be up there. He is also Spring-Heeled Jack, with coiled steel in his legs.
So all of this house - Victorian high-ceiling'd as it is, with many shelves all heaped high with kipple - is a great adventure playground to him, and he is adventuring all over. Which means that my days are punctuated with reports of his progress, as gravity operates gleefully upon those piles he disturbs (y'know, I used to puzzle over why gravity was defined as a 'weak' force - but here we are, gravity the size of a planet, and it's defied by shelving? In this house? I know how crap those shelves are, I put them up myself...) and all my lovely hoarded Stuff comes crashing down to earth. Especially here, in the office. Papers, books, computer disks, boxes, miscellanea - once they were stacked all higgledy-piggledy and precariously out of the way; now they are all over the floor. I'm leaving them there, partly to avoid the tedium of the same thing happening again, mostly as inducement to perform that mythical act known as Sorting My Life Out. Which will happen in that mythical period known as When I've Got Time. Which is generally asserted to be When The Book Is Finished. Which I do most earnestly hope is not a mythical time; I'm doing my best. But I'm doing it surrounded by an ever-increasing caldera (yes, yes, I know that's not how calderas happen, rather the opposite, indeed; but it was the best instant image I could find, as I sit here in the white-hot stew of my creativity, reluctant to pause till a better one came along...), and if I don't get it done soon I will truly drown in a cat-inspired avalanche of kipple. It's a double-whammy discipline; first he disciplines my working habits, and then he will discipline my house. Someone out there may be grateful.
© Chaz Brenchley 2006
Reproduced here by permission of Chaz Brenchley, who asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.